Day 15: A Cost-Effective Virtualisation Server

So I had that dream again… NO not that one (I told you that in confidence). It’s the one where I have an unlimited budget and could spend it on computer stuff – without getting told off by the wife (that’s how you know it was a dream).

Whilst in my dream I bought a server farm and ended up with a Super AI like J.A.R.V.I.S. I know that is not possible for me in real life, at least not at this moment in time (but if I ever do I let you know).

Why do I want a Server?

At the moment all of my network applications and server-type stuff all run off of one of Apple’s low-end Mac mini’s from 2012 and it’s getting a bit slow, so slow in fact that I can’t run MacOS on it anymore, Linux even struggles but surprisingly I’ve got Windows 10 to run on it quite well, to my chagrin.

The first thing I want it to do would be to manage my home network. At some point in the near future I’ll be upgrading my Hope network and would like one central management interface rather than the 3 I’m using at the moment.

Next up is a storage server. I currently have 1 2TB NAS Drive and a 1TB USB drive that is holding all of my media. Both the NAS drive and the USB are getting old and starting to create problems when accessing media.

I’m also trying to create a smart home, so would like to be able to manage that from a single interface. Though I currently only have the Philips Hue bulbs I am looking into smart locks, blinds and other things. My only requirement being that they don’t need online access to work. A tall ask you may think but MQTT is a Wonderful thing.

One of the most important things for everyone else would be the Plex Server. We use our Plex server more than anything else to watch stuff on the TV. It would be great to have a machine that I can put a Freeview and/or a Satellite card into so we can get live TV throughout the house to rather than just the media we have on the failing hard drives. I will also need the system to be able to transcode on the fly with relative ease, though at some point I might get it to transcode all of my videos.

I also like to experiment so having a way to keep that work separate from everything else would be great. Having said that sandboxing across the board would be even better. I know it’s probably not going to happen but I’d also like to run MacOS on it if possible.

The Hardware

As much as I would love to just head on over Apple’s website and put together an order for a rack-mounted Mac Pro I don’t have the £17,000 to actually buy the thing any time soon. So instead I’m going to head over to Bargain Hardware to see if I can find something comparable for a lot less.

I ended up starting off with the HP ProLiant ML350p Gen8 V2. It’s a 5U rack mount server that has dual CPU slots, 6 x 3.5″ Hard Drives, upto 768GB RAM and has 9 PCI-e expansion slots.

The Config I chose had:

• 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2697 V2 – 12-Core 2.70Ghz (30MB Cache, 8.00GTs, 130W)
  • Whilst not the most powerful by today’s standards this would enable me to set up a render server for Blender and not have to wait anywhere near as long as I do just now with my Mac Book Pro. It would also have enough power to run all of the other pieces of software.
• 8 x 16GB – DDR3 1600MHz (PC3-12800R, 2Rx4)
  • I went with 128GB to start off with as this would be more than enough for my to start off with but there would be plenty of room to expands with the other 16 slots.
• 16 x DDR3 RAM Blank
  • Having the RAM Blanks will help with airflow in the case.
• 1 x 480GB – SATA (6G) SSD – Major Brand New
  • This 480GB SSD would be used to run the operating system.
• 5 x 4TB – SAS (7.2K, 12G) HDD – Major Brand
  • 20TB of 16TB of storage, once put into raid, will be more than enough storage to keep us going for the next few years.
• 1 x 10GbE (Dual Port) SFP+ NIC – Qlogic QLE3242
  • I plan to have the server connected to the Ubiquiti Unifi Switch over 10Gb fibre line so there should be no problems with bandwidth connecting multiple devices over the network.
• 2 x HP Hot-Swap ‘Platinum’ PSU 1200W
  • I went with the 1200w power supplies as I plan on adding a few extra PCIe card in the future

All together this setup, without the extra PCI-e cards , comes to £1353.60. A heck of a saving already from the £17,000 apple wanted off me.

Next I want to add a couple of graphics card to the server to help with rendering and transcoding. and in case I can get MacOS running on this beauty I’m going with the Radeon RX 590s from my Dream Hackintosh Computer post. two of those will add £539.98 bringing the total to £1903.58.

The Software

Whilst this system can run VMWare’s ESXi Software that costs money and upgrade fees each time they decide to release a new version. So instead I’m going with Microsofts Hyper-V offering, as it’s free, and running a bare metal Hypervisor.

I’ve used Hyper-V a few times and while it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that some other software may have it’s easy to use and, through a few change in the Registry if need be, almost everything that it does have can be configured if needed.

After getting Hyper-V installed I’ll be installing a copy of Windows 10 so I can remote in and manage the Hyper-V Server without having to boot into bootcamp on my MacBook every time I want to spin up a new machine.

Next up will be Ubiquiti’s UniFi Controller so I can manage my local network for the single interface I mentioned earlier.

Then FreeNAS heads onto the server to give me the network storage I need. whilst I could potentially use the windows 10 virtual machine for this I would rather keep everything separate, that was if one machine has a problem then it won’t, necessarily, impact the others.

The next virtual machine on the list will be Home Assistant. I like home assistant because it links into almost everything via plugins. I’ll be using the Hass.io installation to I have the web interface making management of our smart home even simpler.

Plex is up next. I’ll be using an ubuntu bistro with the Plex Media Server software installed on top. whilst this does mean that I will need to do a few few things manually over time to keep it up to date or install drivers for DVB cards I have found it to be a bit more robust.

Ubuntu will be used again to create a render server for blender. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to go about it yet but it’s defiantly something that I want available as I’m developing my skills with the software. It also has the added advantage of freeing up my blender instance once I’ve sent my scenes over to the server.

and finally I’ll be installing a few machines to experiment on such as the previously mentioned MacOS/Hackintosh, as well as an extra Windows 10 and ubuntu machine too.

What do you think? Should I change anything? Let me Know in the comments.